TruffleCon 2018 recap.

A Conference that cares more about what you are building versus what you can be sold.

Over the last weekend I attended the first ever Trufflecon here in Portland. To say it was worth every penny is an understatement. I really enjoyed the three day event and was actually sad when it was over.

The Truffle team and Consensys really knocked this conference out of the park.

I've been stewing on this for a few days so I can distill down the things I've learned and the people I met this weekend to reduce the knowledge down to a fine thought stream.

When you decide to invest in something you hope to find something good in return for the value invested. You can make an investment in time, things, and people. With a spouse and children the return is profound happiness in seeing them grow over time in mind and body. In an educational setting you hope to see a return on your investment via knowledge learned or degree earned. With assets like Ethereum, stocks, or Bitcoin you hope for a return of better value than what you initially purchased them for.

My TruffleCon investment of time and money returned a value of knowledge, passion, and networking among other like minded folks. I felt it was an investment well spent.

Since I cannot remember every little detail and push it into this space, I will recall some of my favorite things about the conference.

Favorite project

"Colony makes it easy for people all over the world to build organizations together online"

I went to a few talks given by the folks at Colony and every one of them left me with my jaw wide open. I really was unaware of the project until this weekend, but really learned a lot from them and how they work. From smart contract testing to dapp upgradability they seemed to have a pretty deep knowledge of the Ethereum system and Truffle Suite.

I really want to build something on their platform now.

Elena giving a talk on wiring upgradable smart contracts

Favorite talk

While I've done the Metacoin deployment multiple times David really brought home the idea of "Blockchain DevOps" in which you can use Github AND Azure to build and deploy dapps which was pretty cool! The slides link is just a github repo with a walk through, I recommend giving it a try.

Since I'am at a large enterprise this was right up my alley for knowledge I can bring back to work on immediately.

Favorite Moment

YES!

THEY HAD CUSTOM MADE TRUFFLES FROM PORTLAND!

I was wondering where the truffles were at the coffee area, and during Tim's keynote they had runners come out and deliver them to us. Classy.

Favorite reason to attend

The first day workshop sessions. It is where I finally got to meet folks I had been chatting with online. It was really cool to build those relationship over time online, and then not be awkward when finally meeting. I also learned some new tricks for working with Drizzle and v5 of the Truffle Suite.

Wrapping up my thoughts

I will definitely recommend going to next year's TruffleCon as it is a great experience, and it also will be in Seattle at Microsoft's campus which should be neat to see [I might be able to attend a real NHL Seattle hockey game by then!]. I'm also happy it will continue to be in the Pacific Northwest and not somewhere like Cleveland [yes, I am making fun of Pycon].